open source | Platypus

Common(s) in Science and Technology? Dispatches from the SEEKCommons Network

 Insha Bint Bashir, Luis Felipe R. Murillo, Matias Milia  December 17, 2024

This is the Introduction post to our new SEEKCommons series. The posts in this series are forthcoming, and will be linked here in this Introduction as they are published over the next several months. What does the “common(s)” mean for the present and future of science and technology? Are there novel dynamics at play in how knowledge infrastructures are being built, controlled, and contested today? It is with the goal of exploring these interconnected questions that we conceived of the Socio-Environmental Knowledge Commons (SEEKCommons) network—a collective platform where the “common” stands as a political horizon for collaborative social, technical, and environmental work. (read more...)

The FDA, Patient Empowerment, and the Type 1 Diabetes Communities in the Era of Digital Health

 Samantha Gottlieb  April 23, 2019

The day-long September 2018 workshop, “Medical Devices-Patient Engagement in Real World Evidence: Lessons Learned and Best Practices,” sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and University of Maryland (UM), met on the Baltimore campus, the city where I spent my graduate school years. In contrast to Baltimore’s palpable desperation, UMB’s health campus gleamed with newness, its brick walkways and tastefully planted vegetation viewable through floor-to-ceiling windows. In the well-appointed auditorium, Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH, pronounced ‘cedar’), closed his introduction to the conference with the pronouncement that as the FDA moved toward real world evidence (RWE), “patient engagement” and the data patients may collect are invaluable for RWE. (read more...)

Teaching with Warez: Korsakow and the Database Documentary

 Jennifer Cool  May 20, 2013

For the last three years, I have used Korsakow, an open-source application for making database films (K-films) and other types of non-linear, interactive narrative, in classes with both undergraduate digital art students and graduate students in visual anthropology. I expect visual anthropologists will have the most interest, but these reflections also have broader relevance to the anthropology of technology and computing. I heard about Korsakow in Jan or Feb 2010 from Steve Anderson at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. At that time I was teaching video production in a newly launched MA program in visual anthropology at USC and was also a lecturer in Studio Art at UC Irvine where I taught visual culture and the foundation series in digital art. In spring 2010, I got assigned a class I hadn’t taught before, “Interdisciplinary Digital,” an intermediate projects course focused on the art-making affordances, imaginaries, and practices of networked, digital (read more...)